Re:Gender works to end gender inequity by exposing root causes and advancing research-informed action. Working with multiple sectors and disciplines, we are shaping a world that demands fairness across difference.

Caregiving

Compared to men, women spend a disproportionate amount of time attending to the needs of children and adults under their care.. Because of caregiving demands, more than half of employed women caregivers have made special workplace arrangements, such as arriving late, leaving early or working fewer hours. Women represent 61 percent of all caregivers and 75 percent of caregivers who report feeling very strained emotionally, physically or financially by such responsibilities. Minor-aged women and girls also shoulder caregiving duties, usually unrecognized and uncompensated. Affordable, accessible, quality child care and elder care, as well as greater delegation of responsibilities to spouses and partners, are required to offset the overwhelming care loads within families and communities.

Women who worked irregularly scheduled night shifts had up to a 60% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than women who worked only day and evening hours, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine.

Editorial:

From the article:

Women who worked irregularly scheduled night shifts had up to a 60% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than women who worked only day and evening hours, according to a study published online December 6 in PLOS Medicine.

The study, led by An Pan, PhD, a research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, found that women who had worked rotating night shifts at least 3 times per month for 1 to 2 years had a 5% increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The risk rose the longer a woman had done rotating night-shift work, from 20% after 3 to 9 years to almost 60% for 20 or more years.

BackgroundRotating night shift work disrupts circadian rhythms and has been associated with obesity, metabolic syndrome, and glucose dysregulation. However, its association with type 2 diabetes remains unclear. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate this association in two cohorts of US women.

Methods and FindingsWe followed 69,269 women aged 42–67 in Nurses' Health Study I (NHS I, 1988–2008), and 107,915 women aged 25–42 in NHS II (1989–2007) without diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer at baseline. Participants were asked how long they had worked rotating night shifts (defined as at least three nights/month in addition to days and evenings in that month) at baseline. This information was updated every 2–4 years in NHS II. Self-reported type 2 diabetes was confirmed by a validated supplementary questionnaire. We documented 6,165 (NHS I) and 3,961 (NHS II) incident type 2 diabetes cases during the 18–20 years of follow-up. In the Cox proportional models adjusted for diabetes risk factors, duration of shift work was monotonically associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in both cohorts. Compared with women who reported no shift work, the pooled hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) for participants with 1–2, 3–9, 10–19, and ≥20 years of shift work were 1.05 (1.00–1.11), 1.20 (1.14–1.26), 1.40 (1.30–1.51), and 1.58 (1.43–1.74, p-value for trend <0.001), respectively. Further adjustment for updated body mass index attenuated the association, and the pooled hazard ratios were 1.03 (0.98–1.08), 1.06 (1.01–1.11), 1.10 (1.02–1.18), and 1.24 (1.13–1.37, p-value for trend <0.001).

ConclusionsOur results suggest that an extended period of rotating night shift work is associated with a modestly increased risk of type 2 diabetes in women, which appears to be partly mediated through body weight. Proper screening and intervention strategies in rotating night shift workers are needed for prevention of diabetes.

Linda Basch and Christina Hoff Sommers debate whether women belong in the workplace or whether stay-at-home motherhood should be a choice.

Editorial:

Linda Basch argues: "Women belong in the workplace. It is right for families, communities, the economy and, most importantly, for women so that they can live to their full potential as productive and self-reliant individuals."

According to a report published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, young registered nurses are now entering the workforce at a rate not seen since the 1970s.

After peaking at 190,000 in 1979, the number of RNs between the ages of 23 and 26 plummeted below 110,000 in the early '90s. That's a drop of about 50 percent, bottoming out at 102,000 in 2002.

Then, unexpectedly, everything changed. Between 2002 and 2009, the number of mid-20-something RNs jumped by 62 percent. According to the report, "If these young nurses follow the same life-cycle employment patterns as those who preceded them -- as they appear to be thus far -- then they will be the largest cohort of registered nurses ever observed."

But if your local hospital already has a shortage of nurses, it might be a little early to celebrate the trend. A second Health Affairs study published Monday found that nurses rarely move very far for a job. In fact, 52.5 percent of nurses work within 40 miles of where they attended high school.

Next to teaching, the report shows, nursing is one of the least-mobile professions for women. Without intervention, areas currently struggling to produce RNs probably won't be seeing an upswing in their numbers any time soon.

Not only are working mothers multitasking more frequently than working fathers, but their multitasking experience is more negative as well, according to a study in the December 2011 issue of the American Sociological Review. The study found that working mothers spend about 10 more hours per week multitasking than do working fathers, 48.3 hours per week for moms compared to 38.9 for dads. But the authors said an even bigger issue than the time discrepancy is the difference in the way multitasking makes working mothers and fathers feel.

Newswise — WASHINGTON, DC, November 28, 2011 — Not only are working mothers multitasking more frequently than working fathers, but their multitasking experience is more negative as well, according to a new study in the December issue of the American Sociological Review.

“Gender differences in multitasking are not only a matter of quantity but, more importantly, quality,” said Shira Offer, the lead author of the study and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. “Our findings provide support for the popular notion that women are the ultimate multitaskers and suggest that the emotional experience of multitasking is very different for mothers and fathers.”

In terms of quantity, the study found that working mothers spend about 10 more hours per week multitasking than do working fathers, 48.3 hours per week for moms compared to 38.9 for dads.

“This suggests that working mothers are doing two activities at once more than two-fifths of the time they are awake, while working fathers are multitasking more than a third of their waking hours,” said study coauthor Barbara Schneider, the John A. Hannah Chair and University Distinguished Professor in the College of Education and Department of Sociology at Michigan State University.

But the authors said an even bigger issue than the time discrepancy is the difference in the way multitasking makes working mothers and fathers feel. “There is a considerable disparity in the quality of the multitasking experience for working moms and dads,” Offer said. “For mothers, multitasking is—on the whole—a negative experience, whereas it is not for fathers. Only mothers report negative emotions and feeling stressed and conflicted when they multitask at home and in public settings. By contrast, multitasking in these contexts is a positive experience for fathers.”

The Offer-Schneider study relies on data from the 500 Family Study, a multi-method investigation of how middle-class families balance family and work experiences. The 500 Family Study collected comprehensive information from 1999 to 2000 on families living in eight urban and suburban communities across the United States. Most parents in the 500 Family Study are highly educated, employed in professional occupations, and work, on average, longer hours and report higher earnings than do middle-class families in other nationally representative samples. Although the 500 Family Study is not a representative sample of families in the United States, it reflects one of the most time pressured segments of the population. The Offer-Schneider study uses a subsample of 368 mothers and 241 fathers in dual-earner families from the 500 Family Study.

According to Offer and Schneider, their study shows that at least some of the difference in the way multitasking makes working mothers and fathers feel is related to the types of activities they perform.

“When they multitask at home, for example, mothers are more likely than fathers to engage in housework or childcare activities, which are usually labor intensive efforts,” Offer said. “Fathers, by contrast, tend to engage in other types of activities when they multitask at home, such as talking to a third person or engaging in self-care. These are less burdensome experiences.”

The study found that among working mothers, 52.7 percent of all multitasking episodes at home involve housework, compared to 42.2 percent among working fathers. Additionally, 35.5 percent of all multitasking episodes at home involve childcare for mothers versus 27.9 for fathers.

The authors also believe that multitasking—particularly at home and in public—is a more negative experience for working mothers than for fathers because mothers’ activities are more susceptible to outside scrutiny.

“At home and in public are the environments in which most household- and childcare-related tasks take place, and mothers’ activities in these settings are highly visible to other people,” Schneider said. “Therefore, their ability to fulfill their role as good mothers can be easily judged and criticized when they multitask in these contexts, making it a more stressful and negative experience for them than for fathers.”

Working fathers don’t typically face these types of pressures, the authors said. “Although they are also expected to be involved in their children’s lives and do household chores, fathers are still considered to be the family’s major provider,” Offer said. “As a result, fathers face less normative pressures and are under less scrutiny when they perform and multitask at home and in public.”

So, what can be done to improve the situation for mothers? It’s pretty simple—fathers need to step up.

“The key to mothers’ emotional well-being is to be found in the behavior of fathers,” Offer said. “I think that in order to reduce mothers’ likelihood of multitasking and to make their experience of multitasking less negative, fathers’ share of housework and childcare has to further increase.”

Policymakers and employers can help facilitate this, the authors said. “Policymakers and employers should think about how to alter current workplace cultures, which constitute serious obstacles when it comes to getting fathers more involved in their families and homes,” Offer said.

“For example, I think that fathers should have more opportunities to leave work early or start work late, so they can participate in important family routines; to take time off for family events; and to limit the amount of work they bring home, so they can pay undivided attention to their children and spouse during the evening hours and on weekends. The goal is to initiate a process that will alter fathers’ personal preferences and priorities and eventually lead to more egalitarian norms regarding mothers’ and fathers’ parenting roles.”

About the American Sociological Association and the American Sociological ReviewThe American Sociological Association (www.asanet.org), founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions to and use of sociology by society. The American Sociological Review is the ASA’s flagship journal.

The research article described above is available by request for members of the media. For a copy of the full study, contact Daniel Fowler, ASA’s Media Relations and Public Affairs Officer, at (202) 527-7885 or pubinfo@asanet.org.

This study suggests that multitasking constitutes an important source of gender inequality, which can help explain previous findings that mothers feel more burdened and stressed than do fathers even when they have relatively similar workloads. Using data from the 500 Family Study, including surveys and the Experience Sampling Method, the study examines activities parents simultaneously engage in and how they feel when multitasking. We find that mothers spend 10 more hours a week multitasking compared to fathers and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare. For mothers, multitasking activities at home and in public are associated with an increase in negative emotions, stress, psychological distress, and work-family conflict. By contrast, fathers’ multitasking at home involves less housework and childcare and is not a negative experience. We also find several similarities by gender. Mothers’ and fathers’ multitasking in the company of a spouse or children are positive experiences, whereas multitasking at work, although associated with an increased sense of productivity, is perceived as a negative experience.

About 2.1 million Mexicans are employed as domestic workers, with women accounting for about 90 percent of such employees, and the majority lack employment contracts, are not registered in the social security system and are subjected to discrimination, long work days, poor pay and other forms of abuse, the National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, said.

About 2.1 million Mexicans are employed as domestic workers, with women accounting for about 90 percent of such employees, and the majority lack employment contracts, are not registered in the social security system and are subjected to discrimination, long work days, poor pay and other forms of abuse, the National Council to Prevent Discrimination, or Conapred, said.

The figures come from a survey of domestic workers that was conducted in association with U.N. Women and the International Labor Organization, or ILO, Conapred said in a report presented to the Senate.

The 2010 National Survey on Discrimination in Mexico, or Enadis, found that 38 percent of domestic workers consider excessive work and low pay the main problems facing them, while 19.3 percent complained of mistreatment and discrimination, among other abuses, as well as the lack of labor rights.

Women Like Us, a London-based recruiting firm, surveyed 1,554 women to find out how they were approaching their eventual return to work after their children were born. They found that worry about re-entering the workforce starts surprisingly early, and and isn't disposed of easily.

When we hear the phrase "ticking clock" applied to a woman's personal life, we usually assume the word "biological" belongs in the middle. But now two recruiters who specialize in finding part-time work for mothers describe another ticking clock -- one related to going back into the workforce after the kids are born.

Women Like Us, a London-based recruiting firm, surveyed 1,554 women to find out how they were approaching their eventual return to work after their children were born. They found that worry about re-entering the workforce starts surprisingly early, and and isn't disposed of easily. Specifically:

-- More than half of women said that worry about their return to work kept them up at night. Some 56% of the women surveyed said that worries about re-entering the workforce was causing them to lose sleep. And since many of these women have young children, you can bet they don't have much extra sleep to give up!

-- The greatest single concern is fitting work and family schedules together. Nearly half of women -- 43% -- said this was a concern. Twelve percent of women were stressed because they didn't know what sort of job they should apply for next, and 9% were worried about the prospect of going on job interviews again.

-- A large share of these women seem to be pretty much consumed by worry. Some 36% say they worry about finding work at least six times a day (once every few hours). An additional 10% say they worry about finding work more than ten times a day.

-- Worry starts early. One in ten of the women surveyed say they first started worrying about returning to work before their children were born, when they were still pregnant.

Says Karen Mattison, the co-founder of Women Like Us:

Many of us have our own internal "ticking career clocks" and the stress surrounding the search for work post-children is clearly keeping many women awake at night. There are so many issues to work through: "Should I go back to my old career, or is it time to start anew? How should I cover the break to have kids on my [resume]? Where do I even begin looking for jobs in today's market?"

Special report explores the reasons why progress in the rich world seems to have stalled and what can be done about it. It will start by explaining what sort of work women do, and why that matters.

Editorial:

From the article:

This special report will explore the reasons why progress in the rich world seems to have stalled and what can be done about it. It will start by explaining what sort of work women do, and why that matters.

U.S. births dropped for the third straight year — especially for young mothers — and experts think money worries are the reason.

A federal report released Thursday showed declines in the birth rate for all races and most age groups. Teens and women in their early 20s had the most dramatic dip, to the lowest rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s. Also, the rate of cesarean sections stopped going up for the first time since 1996.

U.S. births dropped for the third straight year — especially for young mothers — and experts think money worries are the reason.

A federal report released Thursday showed declines in the birth rate for all races and most age groups. Teens and women in their early 20s had the most dramatic dip, to the lowest rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s. Also, the rate of cesarean sections stopped going up for the first time since 1996.

Experts suspected the economy drove down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off having children. With the 2010 figures, suspicion has turned into certainty.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt now that it was the recession. It could not be anything else,” said Carl Haub, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. He was not involved in the new report.

...

CDC report:http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Many states and localities, as well as the U.S. Congress, have considered legislation or ballot measures requiring that employers provide paid sick days to their workers. Such laws have been approved in the state of Connecticut, the cities of San Francisco and Seattle, and the District of Columbia. There has been much debate about the merits of such laws—which could affect the lives of the two-fifths of private sector employees without access to paid sick days—particularly regarding the costs and benefits for affected employees and businesses, as well as health effects for employees. This report focuses on the potential impact of paid sick days on the health of employees and their families and presents the following findings.